If you caught my Mansions of Madness review the other week, you'll have gathered I was both impressed and disappointed by the game. The experience of playing is unique, but it feels overpriced especially given limited replay value out of the box. All that, however, has the potential to change given where the game goes in the future. On that basis I asked for, and got, the opportunity to chat to the designer Nikki Valens and Keith Hurley, VP of Media and Interactive at Fantasy Flight. I wanted to explore the game design, the motivation for...

If you played tabletop games of any stripe in Britain in the 80's, Games Workshop was your entire world. The world-famous retailer of miniature battle games started life in 1975 as a small importer of exotic games. Even if you didn't play any of the classic titles they designed in-house, any hobby material in shops stood a good chance of having come in through GW. My gaming life started out as a slavish acolyte of their products and imports. Yet over the last three decades I've come to hate them and love them again twice over. Most recently I...

A while back I interviewed Volko Ruhnke, the designer of Labyrinth and the COIN games, for a feature about political games. I knew it wasn’t going to be a long feature, so I ask for quick, snappy replies.
He gave me a 4,000 word essay.

I did not expect to be enlightened so much in this interview. Knizia is truly no game hack, a brilliant man who was also super nice. Michael Barnes was also brilliant here and what a great time we had with this project.

I'm guessing most of you already know Twilight Struggle is my favourite games, and I'm guessing most of you already know that there's a successful kickstarter running to fund an digital version. So, no prizes for also guessing that I backed the top tier, and arranged to do an interview feature on the adaptation over at pocketgamer. What's perhaps bigger news is that in amongst the interview tidbits I managed to glean there was some mechanical detail from Ananda Gupta about how some the new expansion material in the game is actually going to work. I...